VSTA RTM's with the 2007 Office System

VSTA RTM's with the 2007 Office System

I am excited to announce that Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) was released as an integrated component of the 2007 Office system earlier this week and is available to both Office developers and ISVs!

As Microsoft's future direction in application extensibility, VSTA provides a powerful customization toolset for ISVs, their customers, and their partners. Leveraging Visual Studio and .NET to provide managed extensibility, VSTA enables innovative customization scenarios while offering new levels of security and control. VSTA accelerates and simplifies the development of tailored solutions, helping ISVs grow their partner ecosystems and extend their market reach. By integrating VSTA into their applications, ISVs give their customers a managed environment for tailoring applications to specific business needs.Within VSTA, multiple configuration options offer ISVs deep control over the customization experience, and new technologies make it possible to develop more reliable, version-resilient extensions.You can think of it as the modern, scalable, and more secure version of VBA.

This first release of VSTA makes numerous improvements over the VBA experience and includes many of the beloved VBA favorites.Perhaps the feature most applauded by enterprise BDMs and SI’s is that VSTA customizations are seamlessly opened by any version of Visual Studio enabling professional developers to continue to enhance applications originally created by end user developers – a feature requested by many enterprises because applications often grow in sophistication over time.

A brief rundown of this feature packed release of VSTA includes:

Leverages the innovative Visual Studio (VS) toolset

Multi-language support – VB and C#

Macro Recoding

Windows Forms designer

IntelliSense & Code Tasks

End-user debugging features: breakpoints, watch/auto/locals windows

Supports connected systems development

Web services-based development

Fully leverages the .NET Framework

Running and debugging 32-bit and 64-bit add-ins

Running partial trusted add-ins

Client and Server programming

Common VSTA/VSTO runtime architecture for seamless up-leveling of solutions

Graduated host integration capabilities – “use what you need when you need it”